SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION DISPLAY NAMES PRODUCTS CHOSEN FOR 2011 DISPLAY OF THE YEAR AWARDS

Apple, E Ink, ITRI and Samsung Top Field in Remarkable Year for Display Innovation

CAMPBELL, Calif., May 17, 2011— (Virtual Press Office) - The Society for Information Display (SID), the leading global organization dedicated to the advancement of electronic display technology, today announced its selections for the 2011 Display of the Year Awards (DYAs). The prestigious annual awards honor the products judged by the international DYA committee to exhibit the greatest degree of technical innovation, commercial significance and likely social impact, among other factors. This year’s winners comprise myriad breakthrough developments, and given the preponderance of mobile/handheld technologies, DYA 2011 could easily be subtitled the “Up Close and Personal” awards.

Bob Melcher, chairman of the SID Display of the Year Awards committee, noted, “This list of 2011 DYA award winners honors innovations that are continuing to make interactions with handheld communication and computing devices more exciting, intuitive and useful than ever before. They demonstrate the remarkable contributions made by the display industry to broaden and enhance the lives of people.”

The six products chosen—two each for Display, Display Component and Display Application of the Year—will be honored during Display Week 2011, being held this week at the Los Angeles Convention Center. The Gold Award-winning company in each category will screen a short video on its winning product during the awards ceremony at the annual SID luncheon on Wednesday, May 18.

A brief description of each of the winning products is provided below. In-depth descriptions of the award winners can be found in the Display Week 2011 Show Issue of Information Display magazine.

Display of the Year

Gold Award: Apple iPhone 4 Retina Display
This year, Apple extended its track record of revolutionizing personal communications technology with the introduction of the industry-leading iPhone 4 Retina display. Packing four times the number of pixels into the same 3.5-in. dia. screen found on earlier iPhone models, the 640x960-pixel Retina display set a new benchmark for mobile display resolution, low power consumption and image quality. Utilizing Mobile IPS (in-plane switching) technology, the iPhone 4 Retina display achieves a viewing angle superior to conventional mobile LCDs, providing an enhanced viewing experience for the end user in virtually any application. The display features a host of technical advancements: customized LTPS TFT backplane with organic passivation and optimized pixel design; user-customizable, auto-adjustable brightness using ambient light sensing; advanced IPS compensation polarizer technology for high contrast (800:1) and color consistency regardless of viewing direction; 8-bit color depth; an ultra-thin, tiny-footprint driver IC; and patent-pending mechanical integration.

Silver Award: Samsung Mobile Display On-cell Touch AMOLED
Samsung Mobile Display developed its OCTA – on-cell touch active-matrix light-emitting diode (AMOLED) – display to meet the ever-increasing performance and industrial design demands of today’s modern mobile devices. Unlike prior-generation touch-capable mobile displays, the OCTA display integrates the touch sensor onto the display itself, rather than fabricating the sensor on a separate glass substrate and then laminating it onto the display. This innovation, embodied in the OCTA’s projected capacitive touch detection technology, greatly reduces product weight and thickness, while increasing touch performance and response via the multi-sensor input capability that enables gesture recognition for the most advanced mobile devices. Moreover, because AMOLEDs are self-emissive, no backlight is required, allowing the Samsung OCTA display to deliver very high performance and exceptional display quality, with highly accurate and sensitivity-optimized touch input, in a module that is less than 2 mm thick and provides nearly 100-percent light transmission and exceptional outdoor visibility.

Display Application of the Year

Gold Award: Apple iPad
The iPad marks a new era of tablet computing, transforming the way people communicate, consume and create content, play games and learn. The iPad LCD’s Mobile IPS technology combines with its innovative Multi-Touch user interface and unique system design to enable the iPad’s versatility in numerous applications. The iPad display provides a superior viewing experience with a minimized gamma shift over viewing angles, enabling designers to create innovative apps that further enhance the viewing experience. The iPad’s fully customized design leverages the existing amorphous silicon thin-film transistor (a-Si TFT) infrastructure in an innovative, ultra-thin product with the unique LCD and an innovative power-management system that achieves maximum power efficiency – 10 hours of battery life for WiFi web surfing and 9 hours for 3G web surfing.

Silver Award: Samsung Galaxy S Mobile Smartphones
In June 2010, Samsung Mobile launched its first-ever premium portfolio of smartphones – the first-ever premium smartphone suite to be simultaneously unveiled by all four major U.S. mobile carriers. The Galaxy S lineup provides a premium viewing experience with a brilliant 4-inch display powered by Samsung’s Super AMOLED touch-screen technology, which yields thinner displays to enable some of the industry’s thinnest, most responsive, full-featured smartphones. Created to be an ideal medium for viewing premium entertainment content, the Samsung Galaxy S phones tap into Samsung’s own content service, Samsung Media Hub, optimized for the best viewing and audio experience based on device screen size, screen type, video resolution, memory type, processor and sound profile. The next-generation Super AMOLED Plus adds RealStripe screen technology and a greatly increased sub-pixel count – 50 percent more sub-pixels than the original Super AMOLED – complementing the mechanics of the human eye to ensure images look clearer and more detailed than ever before.

Display Component of the Year

Gold Award: E Ink Triton™ Color ePaper Display
E Ink Triton™ is a color electronic paper display, which delivers the same great paper-like reading experience adopted by eReader devices around the world, but now with the added capability of color. Triton delivers the same high-contrast, sunlight-readable, low-power performance as the black and white E Ink Pearl™ product. The addition of color enhances the reading experience to better address the needs of ePublishing markets, including eBooks, eNewspapers, eMagazines and eTextbooks, as well as electronic signage. Triton adds a color filter array (CFA) over a black and white electrophoretic display (EPD) film. Each pixel in the CFA consists of four sub-pixels; red, green, blue and white. This arrangement creates a low-power EPD display with thousands of colors that is highly readable in direct sunlight yet does not sacrifice the black and white reading experience. In addition to color, E Ink Triton delivers 20 percent faster page update times compared to previous technologies.

Silver Award: ITRI Flexible Substrate for Displays
ITRI has developed an innovative flexible substrate for displays of all sizes. Compatible with existing TFT infrastructures and processes, the ITRI flexible substrate is a novel inorganic dominated silica/polyimide (PI) hybrid film whose silica content can be increased to as high as 60 percent of the total weight, making it highly suitable for the fabrication of flexible displays. The ITRI flexible substrate can be manufactured with either batch-type or roll-to-roll (R2R) processes. For batch-type processes, the substrate is prepared by coating the PI solution on glass carriers, and then fabricating TFT devices on the substrates. The PI/silica film exhibits excellent adhesion with silicon dioxide, silicon nitride and indium-tin-oxide without requiring any other primer or surface treatment process. For R2R processes, the ITRI substrate can be made with a variety of attractive properties, such as a low coefficient of thermal energy (CTE) of 20 ppm/ºC, high transmittance (around 90 percent, within the wavelength range of 400 to 700 nm) and excellent flexibility. To date, a flexible color filter, an active-matrix electrophoretic display (AM-EPD) and a flexible touch film have been made on the ITRI flexible substrate.

About Display Week
The 49th SID International Seminar and Exhibition, dubbed Display Week 2011, will take place Sunday, May 15, through Friday, May 20, 2011, at the Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles, Calif. Display Week is the premier international gathering of scientists, engineers, manufacturers and users in the field of electronic information displays. For more information on Display Week 2011, visit http://www.sid2011.org, or follow us on Twitter at @DisplayWeek. Share any Display Week-related tweets using the hash tag #SID2011.

About SID:
The Society for Information Display (SID) is the only professional organization focused on the display industry. In fact, by exclusively focusing on the advancement of electronic-display technology, SID provides a unique platform for industry collaboration, communication and training in all related technologies while showcasing the industry’s best new products. With more than 6,000 members worldwide, the organization’s members are professionals in the technical and business disciplines that relate to display research, design, manufacturing, applications, marketing and sales. To promote industry and academic technology development, while also educating consumers on the importance of displays, SID hosts more than ten conferences a year, including Display Week, which brings industry and academia all under one roof to showcase technology that will shape the future. SID’s global headquarters are located at 1475 S. Bascom Ave., Ste. 114, Campbell, Calif. 95008. For more information, visit http://www.sid.org.